Taft attempts to pick up spares in last week

by Erik A. Carlson
Staff Writer

Editors note: This is the first of two stories profiling the campaigns of Ohio’s major gubernatorial candidates. A look inside the Tim Hagan campaign will run Friday.

 COLUMBUS — The well-oiled Taft-Bradley 2002 campaign hit the road this weekend in a posh bus with a caravan in chase along with a gaggle of support staff armed with two-way radios in their ears and cell phones on their belts.

The governor’s weekend began at an assisted-living facility in Columbus as he helped with the gardening for Make A Difference Day, a day of volunteerism that Gov. Bob Taft’s wife, Hope, has promoted throughout the state.

From there, Taft, the first lady and lieutenant governor candidate Jennette Bradley boarded the bus with members of the campaign staff and a small press contingent to start a three-day, 15-stop tour of the state as the Nov. 5 election drew near.

Despite a double-digit lead in many of the statewide polls, the governor told a crowd at a Republican brunch in Allen County, “The only poll that matters is the one taken on Election Day.”

He expressed concern that with school levies in five of the six biggest cities in the state — most of them Democratic strongholds — that voters would appear in greater numbers in favor of the Democratic ticket.

“We need the people in Allen County to get out and vote to offset the Democratic parts of the state,” he told the crowd.

The first two days of Taft’s bus tour focused on primarily Republican regions in an effort to get out the vote in areas that could help compensate for Democratic votes in other places.

In the 1998 election Democrats carried Athens County by about 12 percentage points during the Taft versus Lee Fisher race.

Taft’s first stop was at a barbecue celebrating the reopening of the former LTV Steel plant in Marion. The plant had been closed for a few months when LTV went out of business, but reopened in September after a steel company based in Canada purchased it.

Taft addressed the gathering in a blue and white-checkered shirt and old khaki pants with holes stitched closed around the knees.

For the most part, Taft’s appearance was molded with help from his staff.

Taft’s aides kept the governor prepared, whether it was to hand him some Bowling Green Falcons gear for the game where he did the opening coin toss, or to brief him on the names of important people at each campaign stop.

Although his head campaign press secretary and personal assistant stayed on the bus with him, Taft had two advance teams that appeared at every stop, preparing attendees and keeping the gears of the Taft public-relations machine running smoothly — with one exception.

Awaiting the governor’s arrival at a Toledo bowling alley, assistant press secretary Aaron McLear told a reporter for The (Toledo) Blade that the governor was a terrible bowler, although he had never seen the governor bowl.

The next morning, much to the dismay of Taft’s campaign press secretary Orest Holubec, McLear’s off-the-cuff remarks made the lead sentence of The Blade article.

While the bus waited for the governor to return from church, Holubec worked the phones, notifying Taft’s communications director and McLear himself of the bowling faux pas.

Taft did not mind the wayward comments of his young aide, noting that in the two frames he bowled, he had a spare and in the other he left only one pin standing.

Between stops Taft outlined his platform for his next four years in office. That includes increasing funding for higher education and using Golden Buckeye Cards to save senior citizens 10 percent to 15 percent on prescription drugs.

“All our departments are going through a budget process right now to see (if there is) any way they can squeeze more out, tighten their belt anymore, or how they can moderate the increase in their budget while preserving essential services,” Taft said.

He said the only portions of the budget that definitely will increase are primary and secondary education funding, to conform to a Supreme Court ruling that current funding methods are unconstitutional, along with Medicaid and higher education funding.

Taft was unsure how much of an increase higher education will see, or where the money for it will come from. But he said it could be done, while reinstating tuition caps in the next two-year state budget.

Since the state tuition cap came off in the most recent Ohio budget, Ohio University has raised tuition 8 percent and 9.9 percent for current students in the past two academic years.

“My commitment is to propose tuition caps in the budget and push for those,” he said.

Taft continued to say it was his intent to try to reinstate the caps at the previous 6 percent limit.

“They certainly won’t be any higher than 6 (percent),” he said.